Diego Olivas
-
I hate to apologize for doing this, but once again you’re hearing in a mix of mine some jettisoned-off idea I had once tried to write about. What is “nouvelle chanson française”? Simply translated, it means the new French song. Somewhere, a sorely confused Wikipedia article tries to explain it off as some genre stylistic…
-
We’re back in the thick of it. Divining that perfect balance of nature and melody, Satoshi Sumitani now joins us in this long journey through Japanese environmental music. Part of CBS/Sony’s quite forward-thinking environmental music imprint, Sound Forest, 不思議の森～Forest Marvelously～ (or Fushigi no mori, Mysterious Forest) took ideas that were taking root in Japan’s New…
-
Ok, I’ll faint ignorance on this one but is it enough for me to pass up this opportunity? No. For all of my life, I’ve never stepped inside the realm of Swarovski. From a distance I’ve seen their impeccably lit stores, full of impossibly well lit, spotless floors, salespersons decked out in formal attire, and…
-
Truly no one is a prophet in their own land. Simply scroll down and look at the all Japanese superstars of boogie, funk, AOR and all other sorts of genres backing up British-born singer Loretta “Zoé” Heywood. Members of Mariah, the elite boogie duo of Yuji Toriyama and Ken Morimura, shall I continue? Mr. Logic…
-
Sometimes, I feel that there’s no truer saying than this one: “you can never be a prophet in your own land”. It still boggles my mind that a) Coati Mundi’s The Former 12 Year Old Genius has never been reissued in any digital format and b) his work was never remotely as popular in his…
-
Forgive my roundabout way to get back to the healing music of Japan’s Awa record label. I feel like we should go back to Okinawa and discover where it all began. It is on しおのみち (Shio-No-Michi) that Hideaki Masago rounded up like minded Japanese musicians to fashion a label that could tap into ethnic music…
-
This might sound like yet that same old story: Noted folkloric or jazz muso discovers drum machines, synths, and samplers, proceeds to turn into both a sweeping statement unlike anything else in their oeuvre/pisses old fans off. I can play Madlibs with my write-up for Joan Bibiloni’s For A Future Smile and substitute Lisboa-native Júlio…
-
Although the mind behind rotating Southeast Asian supergroup Asiabeat has always been gifted Malaysian percussionist (and Fulbright Scholar) Lewis Pragasam, on Spirit Of The People, the heart of Japan moved him towards a sound that’s quite indefinable. Decamping in Singapore, in 1991, Lewis was joined by Makoto Matsushita, Chito Kawachi, and friends Mohd Nor, Nantha…
-
Don’t stop, can’t stop, the dance. Something else to fill your expanding Balearic canon: Randy Tico’s Earth Dance. Not quite jazz, world beat, tribal, or New Age, in 1990, in the dead heat of summer, Randy released on the aptly named Higher Octave Music record label a burner of a New Age album that put…
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic